Vertical CPG

Marketers are no strangers to difficult circumstances. Rising prices and persuading people to buy stuff in the midst of a recession are just some of the challenges facing marketers right now.

With third-party identifiers all but gone, CPG marketers are starting to get anxious.

For the past several weeks, U.S. consumers have faced an onslaught of financial woes: Inflation is on the rise, interest rates are sky high and the stock market continues to decline. This tumultuous economic climate has many fearing the U.S. is facing another recession. And it has caused many CPG brands to reconsider their marketing strategy on the heels of huge pandemic gains.

School might be out for summer, but for back-to-school marketers, things are already heating up for the fall.

During the pandemic, CPG ad spend exploded—increasing $19 billion in just two years—and it shows no signs of stopping. According to eMarketer, CPG ad spend is expected to increase this year to $36 billion dollars, up from $30.5 billion in 2021, and will grow even more in 2023.

Retail media networks are on the rise—and they aren’t just for the giants like Amazon anymore. Retailers of all sizes can use their first-party data to drive sales and bring in ad spend from their brand partners. But where do you start??  

Let’s take a short trip back to March 2020—no mask required.

CPG brands saw a massive increase in sales during COVID-19. With consumers sheltered at home, they found comfort in traditional products and brands and discovered new brands when their favorites were out of stock. As most CPG categories experienced double-digit growth in 2020 – and CPG overall grew an unprecedented 11% - brands also saw an influx of new customers.

Although digital has been a significant part of shopper marketing for a few years now, connecting with customers digitally on an individual, one-to-one level has been a challenge for the industry. Why? Because most of the data comes in the form of "audiences" and "segments," not individual journeys.

The biggest topic in marketing in the past year has been data deprecation and its impact on knowing your consumers in a digital context. But there have been other forces at play for some time—changing privacy regulations, walled gardens restrictions and consumer-driven privacy control—culminating in one conclusion for nearly every marketer: They need to double-down on first-party data.

For Anheuser-Busch InBev, the role of the consumer has never been more important.

At the end of the last school year, 60% of kids were going to school at least part of the week, and it’s likely that number rises heading into next year. As in-person schooling crawls back towards normalcy, so too does in-store grocery shopping – 85% of shoppers are back in the aisles. Does your digital marketing distinguish between parents of in-person and remote learning…

Some CPG brands found themselves with the long end of the stick in 2020 (if there was a long end to be had). Makers of canned tomatoes and toilet paper, for example, were dealing with stock-outs rather than disappearing demand. And shelf-stable packaged potatoes were one of these hot-ticket items.

As we (finally) barrel towards the end of 2020, marketers across industries are bracing for what’s to come of a pandemic-laden holiday season. In order to thrive, marketers need to get strategic and focused with their digital holiday campaigns.

As we (finally) barrel towards the end of 2020, marketers across industries are bracing for what’s to come of a pandemic-laden holiday season. In order to thrive, marketers need to get strategic and focused with their digital holiday campaigns.

It’s safe to say that everything is unpredictable right now. But with knowledge comes understanding, and for CPG brands, it’s important to know how consumers are shopping right now. To that end, Epsilon surveyed consumers on their shopping habits and behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand: How are they really responding during this unprecedented time? The findings, detailed in our recent report, “Consumer Sentiment…

A recent headline in Vogue Business declared “the U.S. cosmetics boom is over.” That prediction may be a bit too critical, but there’s no doubt the industry is on the cusp of a major change.

The first-party data landscape for many traditional CPG brands can be challenging as most brands lack possession of the transactional relationship that fuels consumer data and is often preserved by grocers and big-box retailers.

Remember when a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand could launch a Shopify store and build a million-dollar business via social media overnight?

In the era of technological innovation, data is the currency, and every startup, challenger brand and legacy retailer needs it to provide better customer experiences and close more sales.